Tangential, and probably preaching to the choir here, but I really hate the modern web design trends.
I check up on the websites of current and former employers, and they've basically all turned into this same template where all the text is vague and lofty while telling you nothing about the company or service("CloudProduct from Tech Corp is the best way to transform your data operations for next generation workloads"), the graphics are all flat corporate Memphis or stock images (no screenshots or demo videos of the actual product), and the pages all do that annoying thing where effects/elements appear and disappear as you scroll down the page.
I don't know, maybe this is the sort of thing that works on product/marketing people but to me it just seems like pointless fluff and makes me not want to look any deeper into the company or product.
I agree with the substance of what you say, but I wouldn't actually call it a design trend at all, rather it's a marketing trend, and I can tell you exactly where it comes from.
The reason behind it is a philosophy that you're not selling a product but rather a "solution". If I had a nickel for every time I heard someone explain it with the example "a customer isn't buying a drill, they're buying holes". The example apparently goes back to Harvard Business School professor Theodore Levitt, and it was popularized in the mid 2000's [1].
It was a legitimate observation around focusing on customer needs rather than your product line, and so what other products or services might you also be able to profitably provide? And in the tech world it turned into helpfully focusing on product-led "use cases" in UX design -- focusing on user flows of how to get things done, rather than individual features that a user can't figure out how to find or combine.
But then it got taken, in my opinion, waaay too far as marketing people started making websites that focus entirely on the "solution" and say next to nothing about the product. The site says "we'll fill all your hole needs!" and the customer is scratching their heads because they can't tell if this is a company that makes hole punches for 3-ring binders, or excavating equipment for your backyard, or drills.
And it's maddening. I share your pain.
Because it's not how consumers think. They think, I want a drill, and I have strong opinions as to whether I want corded or cordless, and to make sure it's compatible with the drill bits I already own. Consumers are generally pretty smart, and have already made the leap from "hole" to "drill".
So I understand where this "we sell hole solutions!" website pattern comes from, but I swear to god I don't understand why people are still doing it. The whole "it's holes not drills" philosophy has turned into a kind of cargo cult inside of a lot of companies, and it's not pretty.
So that's the genesis of it, but it's much worse: lazy, unprofessional marketing parrots.
80% of people in Marketing have no idea how to Market.
They just know how to 'do marketing things'.
This took me years to figure out, but there are actually few people who rigorously follow good, established marketing concepts, mostly they just 'make copy' 'make web sites' 'do campaigns' and efforts are often judged aesthetically, or by vanity metrics.
Also, we should admit, we've never had so much selection and perhaps most importantly, we've never lived among such abstract concepts.
You've never been confused at the 'Drill Maker' site. Even if they did talk about 'holes' - that would not matter.
Software is intangible, especially for 'newer' things.
But yes, it's unbelievably problematic, and deeply annoying.
Agency people are usually 'creative' - that's not what makes good marketing.
Rules of brand are: clarity, consistency, authenticity. While branding is only one part of it 'clarity' can be applied everywhere.
I'm looking at data.ai aka app annie right now and I want to wrangle he marketing team it's ridiculous to try to fathom what all their dumb products do - they only use abstractions.
Literally 5 products that 'increase ROI and help you meet OKRs' or whatever, my god man What the F is it, and what does it do? is the question at hand here.
Admittedly, it's not always so easy but focus should be on that.
I too share your pain here - BUT - I have another observation:
I think, and I hate that this is true, but I truly think larger enterprises - and specifically the people who make buying decisions within non-technical departments at larger enterprises - really do prefer to buy “solutions” and not tools.
I’m a product guy through and through and it drives me bonkers when I visit websites that try to sell me holes instead of drills. But I’ve worked with B2B SaaS companies, and when you’re selling to non-technical folks, they do seem to want to buy holes. This is particularly so with sales and sales enablement tools. You’ll get people proudly saying things like (to continue to metaphor) “you know I’m not an engineer so I don’t understand these fancy drills to yours. But I sure do like the holes you guys offer and they’ll make me look really good to our CEO”…
Omg yes!! I HATE this current design trend. It makes it EXTREMELY difficult to learn anything useful without, god forbid, talking to a sales rep, which is the absolute LAST thing I want to do in discovery. I automatically write off companies like this right out of the gate and move on. I assume that when I do talk to their sales people, they will paint a misleadingly rosy picture that doesn't match the reality of what we get after the contract is signed.
Humans use biases like how good something or someone looks. As well as other shortcuts and gut feeling. Engineer's biases are different from normal people though. For example a normal person would see someone good looking as competent, and if you don't understand it means that good looking guy is also very smart...
This is well into delusions of grandeur territory. “Engineers” are normal people. “Engineers” do all the same stuff that everyone else does. The only difference is that “engineers” bring some technical understanding to the table that might not otherwise be there, just as any other subject matter expert would. This subject matter expertise will bring varying degrees of value depending on the situation.
I hate this self-congratulatory take that people that write software are godly and unbreakably objective. Software people are just so typically introverted and insular that we have our own social signals that can just as easily be weaponised to have us buy stuff.
I think it's more a mindset than possession of technical knowledge.
I needed to buy some new cutlery. I knew nothing about cutlery, so I went and learned about steel grades, serration types, food service industry standards, etc. In the end, after a few weeks of on-and-off research, I ended up with an excellent WMF set. I told this story to a friend and she laughed, remarking that she would have just gone to the store to get some.
Our needs were the same, but I took a detail-oriented approach focusing on the product, whereas she focused on the solution. Both approaches are valid for our respective priorities, but I'd hazard that the types of people who become engineers (be it software or something else) are more likely to relate to stories like mine.
I don't even look at the product pages; I immediately look for the help or support section and start reading there, the documentation you find in those are much more indicative of the product and what it does.
They copy each other (and frankly, so do we). This style is their common idea of “professional image”. Since many companies have siloed off marketing, they have no real understanding of what’s going on in the rest of the company. At least, that’s how I see it.
If the website contains many sophisticated-looking things like animations etc. it makes many people think you must know a lot because you can come up with such a stylish and sophisticated web-site.
In other words it serves as part of the portfolio of your technological prowess. It does not really help the user of the web-site, it helps to fool them into thinking your product must be awesome. The web-site is part of the product, it's the box around the thing you sell.
Not to disagree, but I think what you might hate more than vapid, copy of a copy of a copy web design, is an industry so out of ideas that the aforementioned website is an accurate portrayal of it.
McMaster's marketing is done well before you type the address into the browser.
Their target custom is someone who needs to quickly get the item so they can go back to their job; make and price are not their concern -- to the extent that you can just email them and say "give me five more shelves" and their customer support people will look through your purchase history to match the model and paint scheme you bought. Or if you're a power plant, you can tell them to get the part to you RIGHT NOW, and they'll pay a courier to drive it from hundreds of miles away. (These are both true stories.)
McMaster's customer behavior is the dream of almost every industry out there.
The added value of this site for a non-native speaker of English is that we get to learn the proper words for the technical things you never know how to call.
It starts with a picture and then you get to the gory details.
> have a fluffy main page to inspire confidence in doing business with them.
Which, oddly perhaps, has the exact opposite effect on me. Another commenter mentioned McMaster-Carr's website. That one inspires confidence (because it exudes competence).
The fact that you are indeed preaching to the choir implies there are few sales people here, or at least none that will speak up. Because for any that I've worked around, they would all vocally defend exactly what you're talking about.
And oh my, the amount of times I've heard the "the more carousels the better, you can't have too many" arguments..
> where effects/elements appear and disappear as you scroll down the page.
I really dislike those, as the whole screen shudders as it tries to re-layout the presentation. It's especially bad when you're on a phone, and you're suddenly in a different place in the article.
> they've basically all turned into this same template where all the text is vague and lofty while telling you nothing about the company or service
A lot of this is not deliberate. It's just incompetence. Writing good product descriptions for a website is really hard.
How do I know? I write copy for our website. Even though I'm an engineer it still tends to come out as fluff + engineering word salad. It takes multiple iterations to get it right. I have huge respect for people who can do this well.
Similar to this: I raised a seed round with a deck that was (deliberately) just black Times New Roman text on a white background, plus a few screenshots. The product was also deliberately simple and rough around the edges.
I stole an idea from Joel Spolskey and made beta features in the app have graphics that were literally drawn in crayon, to make it clear they were unfinished and to make it easy to test changes.
Investors liked the deck. It made it clear that what mattered was the content, not the presentation.
I wonder what percentage of investors might actually draw the conclusion that while you may have a great product, you might be bad at marketing it?
Because, while lots of engineers would like to think that the success of a product is due to the tech and features, the reality is that good market can make a crap product successful a lot more often than a good product can overcome bad marketing and presentation. Craigslist seems to be an exception rather than the rule.
It might have been great marketing for the same sort of counter signaling as the Mark Zuckerberg hoodie. “A man who can dress that poorly must be really good”.
Craigslist is an outlier in many ways. The most significant is that they did not raise huge venture rounds so they have never been existentially committed to fulfilling an investor’s opinion of what a top 25 website should be.
> I stole an idea from Joel Spolskey and made beta features in the app have graphics that were literally drawn in crayon
As a programmer I refuse to waste any cycles on “slightly better than shit programmer art”.
Nope. Colors are magenta, font is Arial, and 3D models are all teapots. It serves two purposes. It signals this is genuinely temp and forces artist/designers to update it.
The danger of making it better is it’s good enough for mocks, shouldn’t ship, but ships because no one took the time to update.
This is a tangent, but perhaps similar to what you are saying.
Dare to stand out. Even if it’s unpopular and immediately pushes away 90% of people. Your goal when dating is not to make everyone like you. It’s to find one person that loves you.
And if you're playing a part to get a result; you'll have to keep playing that part. It can work for a job, but it's a shaky basis for a long-term relationship.
I'm a sadistic fuck that's been made to have the caring range of a rock due to childhood abuse
I'm fine being that way, it's just not conductive to maintaining relationships. Been there, done the whole 'be yourself bollocks' - the results were shit. Pretending to care far more than I do, and constantly suppressing the sardonic and vindictive tendencies has been far more pleasant
'just tweak core aspects of your personality' is exactly the opposite of being yourself
I don’t do PowerPoint presentations often, but whenever I do this is basically what I do. Blank template, just enough text (in the default font), sparse animations/transitions (reserved only for slides when exposition is useful for clarity), and light on graphics.
I'm a lazy guy, so when I _first_ validate a business opportunity for product-market fit, I do a purposefully bad job. If a good job is required, the opportunity isn't good enough.
Hacker News is actually another great example of this concept. If you plotted the appearance vs. usefulness ratio for 1,000 websites, HN would be one of the crazy outliers.
We used NNTP for the D programming language forums for many years. It would regularly come up "why don't you use modern discussion forum software." The problem with that software is the signal to noise ratio of the presentation was very low, while with NNTP it was very high.
We also liked that NNTP didn't allow anything but text. No emojis, no pictures.
But yes, there were advantages to modern forum software. This inspired Vladimir Panteleev to write DFeed, a shell and gui around NNTP. It works as you can see here:
I wonder if there's something generally true about bureaucracies in that: do they all eventually come to value precision over accuracy?
Given how bureaucrats often travel in large packs and seem to find safety in numbers, maybe it's unsurprising that they would value agreeing with each other over finding the truth.
I had no idea the SEO world had its own bureaucracies of human web-site raters, though. I guess it makes sense that lots of large companies would invest in creating that sort of thing. :(
> do they all eventually come to value precision over accuracy?
There are some issues to be aware of here. It isn't possible to do the reverse - to value accuracy over precision - because your accuracy is limited by your precision.
This is a theorem in psychometrics, where the phrasing is that the validity of an assessment (the degree to which it accurately measures some quantity of interest to you) is bounded by the reliability (the degree to which, if you assess the same thing twice, you get similar estimates).
If you find that your assessments aren't accurate enough, you can only fix that by increasing your precision, so the concept of valuing precision over accuracy is a little bit weird.
you can definitely value precision over accuracy - I see it all the time in my place of work
as an accountant, the timeliness of my work is scrutinized far more than the accuracy as I'm not often given enough time to do my work and if I took an extra day or two to get it right, I would be penalized whereas if I do it wrong but do it on time, no one would usually care or notice
> It isn't possible to do the reverse - to value accuracy over precision - because your accuracy is limited by your precision.
Here's what I believe to be a counter-example: always use "Eastern" when communicating a time if you're not absolutely certain whether it's EDT or EST.
Being precise but wrong is often worse than being accurate but imprecise.
Isn't this an issue of only having one way to measure things? It's like the mathematical difference between numeric methods that get you closer to something (eg 10/3 = 3/33333....) vs analytical/symbolic methods that represent values in different ways (eg 10/3 = 3⅓).
I can't really tell what you're saying. But the idea is very straightforward:
The validity of an assessment ("accuracy" in the parent comment's terminology) measures how closely the result of the assessment corresponds to reality. For your assessment to be useful, you want this to be constrained, so that when you make your measurement, you get a result that is close to the truth.
Reliability ("precision") measures how closely the results of one measurement correspond to those of another measurement. It's possible to have a reliable test with low validity. All results from that test would be tightly clustered, similar to each other, but not indicative of whatever you're actually interested in.
It isn't possible to have an unreliable test with high validity. The unreliability of this impossible test would mean that its results were spread out, dissimilar to each other. But the high validity would mean that the test results clustered around the true value of whatever it is you're measuring.
Of course, if a set of values are all constrained to be close to a particular fixed value ("the truth"), they are also constrained to be close to each other. This is why reliability is necessary for validity.
so is old.reddit. Loads almost instantly compared to new.reddit.com. Things just work. I fear it will soon be trashed though as the IPO looms and bean counters try to strip teams down to the bone to get them quarterly profits up to fool investors and then a year reddit is a ghost town. I'm glad that almost for sure can't happen to HN.
Not only do I recommend doing this when building apps or websites initially, but I recommend it for the final product. It ends up being much faster, easier to maintain, easier for people to read, and more accessible.
I have another app in the works that’s using https://picocss.com/ with basically no CSS. It’s great not having to think too much about design elements and focus on only the most important bits of the application.
Minimalism for the sake of minimalism is just as bad as the concept described in the article. For example I find your blog very easy to read but very hard to navigate. I don't understand its structure, I can't find any menus and I don't know when I'm at the end of "something".
Glad it’s easy to read! That’s exactly what it’s optimized for. There’s no real structure to the site, hence no menus and nothing really to navigate to.
I agree minimalism for the sake of minimalism is bad design—I don’t advocate for that. What I do advocate for is minimalism for the sake of accessibility, ease of maintenance, improved readability, etc. I'm also not categorically opposed to adding this stuff if needed. What I find is that most of the time its not a great starting point.
For Thingybase, unless I'm mistaken, your privacy policy and ToS have "if xyz, contact us" scattered all over them, but there is no email address anywhere to be found on the site to contact you at.
Edit: oh, and the delete profile button doesn't work.
I needed some artwork for the Empire game, and needed it right away. So I made some "placeholder" graphics with MS-Paint, in my 2nd grader style, and never got around to doing proper artwork.
Why won’t existing companies that already have the users and existing connections fast follow anything the startup does? They are competing head on with billion dollar companies and adding a chat interface and video conferencing as the differentiation.
They have to do all the hard parts to onboard users, convince them to connect with their financial institutions, establish trust with financial recommendations, build a two sided marketplace with financial advisors, yet Mint or wealth front or many other companies could spend six months and have a better product out in the market with an established user base and way of making money.
> Why won’t existing companies that already have the users and existing connections fast follow anything the startup does?
In this case, I think the founders realized that by focusing on UI and data engineering, they were not focused on the right things: what kind of digital financial assistant is worth paying for?
Finally, the question, "why won't big existing player come eat your lunch?" directs conversation away from opportunity. Products like maybe.co often end up being acquired by big, existing players because huge companies often struggle with invention and ideation, and it's often easier to deploy money to buy the kernel of a great product than what happens in most large, risk-adverse companies when innovation requires internal failure after internal failure before success.
> Why are investors excited by this pivot?
I'm not an investor in maybe.co, but I'm much more interested in what they are doing now that they aren't focused on pretty UI. They have a long way to go before they have something, but as they say, keep a good team on the field long enough... and good things happen.
I’d go a step further and say that none of these types of products actually do the hard work that people would be willing to pay for. E.g. most of these statistics are wrong (net worth increased x% because I rolled over my IRA, dividend reinvestments treated improperly, basis accounted for the wrong way, etc)
The reality is more likely that because they had almost zero traction, they saw all the AI hype and decided to rework the whole product to call ChatGPT APIs to try to capitalize on the wave.
I wouldn’t be surprised if it worked in getting more money from investors because they can call themselves an AI company now!
What's the dilemma? This is literally what Mint and Wealthfront have without the AI chat interface. There's no dilemma to implement that if it this feature resonates with users.
Author of the article here — thanks for all the thoughtful comments and personal experiences! I thought I'd add a couple clarifications:
1. I'm not saying your product needs to look like Craigslist all the way up until the end, just that it's a key test in early stage concept validation. Yes, later on, once VALUE is proven, by all means consider design polish to make the experience even better!
2. Yes, this idea is not unique or brand new (I'm an old Balsamiq fan, Basecamp fan, etc) —— the post is just a direct response to the increase in AI-generated interface mockups. Trying to get people to think a bit more deeply about those.
I'm presently grocery-shopping in another tab, and I am continually amazed at what a terrible UX I put up with. Compare any grocery website to McMaster-Carr and it's not even 10x, it's like 100x worse. But I give them my business because the competition is actually even worse.
There must be something about grocery sites that makes them so awful. I've even submitted feedback to a delivery service that I used to use with comments like
"enabling a filter for meat shows recommended items from other categories above the meat products"
"clicking on page 2 of results resets all filters"
"searching for item X returns a list of results that does not contain it, but navigation shows it clearly exists"
Instacart's "plugin" for Aldi is sooooo slow compared to Amazon. It's some weird amalgamation of single page and multi page "post" type designs. It's kinda pretty though I guess.
Grocery apps are almost universally tedious trash.
Want me to on board? Probably 70 percent of every grocery trip is the same essentials, so just let me scan my recipes and offer the opportunity to quick select from that list of items next time.
McDonalds has at least figured that one out; you can just "reorder last order" from like the last 10.
If you want to feel real pain, try using the grocery apps or similar on slow cell signal; it's death. No! I do NOT need a 12 MB image of the bottle of milk I buy each week, I just want to see if it's back in stock!
Old reddit has less bugs too. First time, using reddit, I used the new version. But my internet connection was too bad, this caused a lot of problems with the new version.
When I knew about the old version, I tried. And wow, almost every bugs I had with the new one went away. Faster load too.
Very niche, but my least favorite web re-design was the used camera retailer KEH.com (this was probably at least a decade ago). They went from a craigslist style listing (text dense, easy to drill down to any level from one page: Nikon Manual Focus ->Fixed length lenses->Nikon Brand || other brand. I think it was one or two clicks to get to a list of stock for a given category) to a regular e-commerce style page. Takes much longer to get to a nice looking page with less info and products displayed.
FWIW I haven't bought any gear from them since that happened, and they used to be my first stop for used equipment.
I think when you are selling to a buyer that knows what they want, its best to stick to a simpler information dense interface (Digikey, McMaster-Carr, etc.). I think a lot of websites try to "chase the trend" and look like Amazon, or whatever, without realizing that it is much harder to get that right than it is to get an ugly page right.
Specifically, I prefer Old Reddit because it shows me all the comments in the thread, rather than just some of them, plus a completely different thread I didn't click on. The visual design is a push for me.
Reddit says something funny about this test, I’m not sure what, though.
Old Reddit is of course so much better. I guess “new” Reddit is shitty either due to the requirements of monetization, or maybe second-system syndrome.
I think the Craigslist test is good, but it is interesting to note that the first, thrown together interface could possibly provide a “false positive,” in the sense that the first implementation could have the advantages of not expecting to be monetized yet, and not having been infected too much by current design fads.
While im skeptical old reddit would be overall more popular, its not valid to look at traffic. You have to know what old reddit is to even get there -- few do. The fact that its up to 10% is frankly astonishingly high imo.
New Reddit unbelievably enough still hasn't fixed the bug where it crashes if you paste text in the input. Whoever is using it is sure not overlapping with the segment that ever participates in any sort of discussion on desktop.
... and also clearly none of the reddit development team is using it either. How else would they miss a breaking bug for five years?! It's not like inputting text is a niche feature.
When old reddit dies, so will much of the content reddit has; I suspect that the percentage of good posts that are made from old.reddit is much higher than 10%.
But what do I know? TikTok is a thing, apparently.
Garbage. People pick products all the time, based purely on how the presentation makes them feel. They buy crap products all the time based on aspirational signals. People are people; this is selling a book; and most of the comments seem to just reveal/confirm a success bias (just 'cuz) or a failure bias (just 'cuz) with absolutely no evidence.
When I onboard a new designer, I usually talk with them about Craig's List, Amazon versus "beautiful" UI. The point is exactly the last line of this article:
"Focus on content and functionality when you’re designing new products; that’s the validation that will build a business."
Now I'm going to add this article to required reading for new engineering team members.
Amazon is bad UI though. The information they present is inconsistent, the descriptions barely make sense, it's hard to compare products. It's byzantine.
I Amazon really bad? Their transaction volume would seem to indicate that users are succeeding in placing orders at a very high frequency. This is exactly why Amazon is a great study for new designers and engineers.
Yes, you are right, and I should have qualified that because I'm aware it's optimized, but it's effectively a grey pattern at best: a UI that is sub-optimal in terms of presentation of information, but optimized for click-through.
I'm sure one could make a case for 'if they buy it it was good' but I suggest people are easily manipulated, especially when confronted with a massive machine with $Billions to figure how to.
But even with both of those things said - I think it is still actually crappy because 1) the click through may be optimized and yet some information could be available to make it better that may not affect click through and 2) the 'long term funnel' may be affected by maligned customers; I avoid Amazon, I suggest others might as well though it may not be that many.
Both are important but look is always second to reliability and functionality. You can have the prettiest book cover in the world but if it's a sandwiching a pile of crap it won't sell.
Speaking as a design consultant who specializes in software: this is good advice! Use the lowest fidelity possible until you figure out what your product is and who it's for. Once you know that, it will give you a clear direction for the visuals and interactions.
For about a decade now I've been building robotics software UIs in a context where we don't have a design team (internal software, tech savvy users, start-up pace). One of the things I've found to work so consistently well is the kind of test shared in this article. I regularly say, "to learn what we don't yet know about the problem space" when asked about why I like shipping things ASAP and then worrying about design characteristics later.
I'm convinced that design regularly impacts a feature's usefulness, but is rarely necessary to make it useful at all. That is: it's important but not required.
Of course this is for a captive audience. For something you're trying to sell, window dressing can matter.
> It’s never been so easy to create incredibly polished mockups
The advice in this article applies even to literal mockups you do as part of regular development (ie: even as part of adding new features to an existing, polished product).
The more "real" your mockup looks, the more concrete it looks and, even if unconsciously. With high-fidelity mockups, you'll typically get feedback about font choice, colors, spacing and other trivial bits.
If you do low-fidelity, you'll get feedback like "why does this data have to be a table?" "Can we just not have these input fields, and move them to advanced options?" "Woah, I thought this would be an entirely different workflow, like (example)".
In the first pass, Low-fidelity can be as low quality as a whiteboard, sharpie or mspaint. If it takes more than a couple minutes to draw (not including thinking / discussion time) it's probably too detailed.
Unfortunately, the advice was to focus on the important user interactions. Actually designing a good user interaction is a skill that most developers (including myself) just don't have. I can tell that there's something wrong, but I can't really tell how to fix it.
That comes with practice. Use the fewest built-in controls for an interaction, then try it out. You’ll probably need to tweak it: add/remove labels, add a control, line breaks, etc.
There’s no magic gene for this, it’s just the willingness and ability to navigate a large design space.
> Actually designing a good user interaction is a skill that most developers (including myself) just don't have.
I'm reminded of Adam Savage's observation that practice alone gets you 80% of the way to mastery. Talent is what gets you the last 20%, but for most things, 80% is good enough.
Really? I don't like modern design or material UI at all, and one of the things I most dislike is huuuge fonts. I apply custom CSS to reduce them to 10-12 pt where 16-24 pt seem common now.
Yes. Look at the GMail UI for example, or Google Groups: https://groups.google.com/g/golang-dev (BTW, its UI designer needs to be fired and banned from working on UI design for life).
There are large empty margins around each line. That grow if you try to increase the scale. If these margins were decreased, you could have seen more information on one screen.
I think whats happening is that displays/devices are increasing in resolution but some websites specify tiny font sizes which don't scale. Not a web developer so I could be wrong.
Hacker news is actually an example of this. I usually zoom in by 110%.
This is really good advise. When I started out, one of the best advise I got as a web designer was to always ask new clients to focus on the content. I had to repeatedly emphasise to the clients who got distracted with beautiful templates or wanted flash-bang animated, multimedia on their site that you need to focus on specific objectives, with content to match this, and my job as designer was to present the content to achieve these goals. But no, the clients were still obsessed with wanting a "banner that showed ripples in water when a drop falls on it" ...
I always felt like Craigslist pre-validated AirBNB as a business. Short-term rooms for rent was already a popular Craigslist section. AirBNB took that and (1) added payment, (2) parametric searching and (3) better profiles.
Craigslist is/was largely where things get listed that don't have a specialized site that fulfills those at least 2 of those. E.g. etsy, ebay, stubhub, online dating, rideshares, gigs
Craigslist did classifieds at the price of free which is impossible to beat (though apparently they're slipping to Facebook marketplace now, but I've no recent data).
And the Craigslist interface is damn close to a classified section in a paper.
Love it. I'd add a 3rd reason to her list, which is not a human bias like the two, but just that high-fidelity mocks lock ideation in the hands of UX.
PMs & engs typically don't have Figma editor rights (I worked with a PM who briefly had it once, and then had it revoked for stepping out of line) or Figma knowledge to brainstorm ideas.
And a 4th reason: high-fidelity mocks encourage snowflake "Figma being used as a new Photoshop" to do novel pixel-perfect layouts instead of the design system's stock/boring layouts.
I encounter this, all the time. Highly polished UX, and crap functionality (or buggy functionality).
In the app we're developing, we spent a lot of time, prototyping the functionality, with a mediocre UX. Once we had decided on it, I refined the business logic into a standalone module, and we're redoing the UX, with a designer.
Sure, I agree. I simplified my SaaS product SticAI.com and removed any unnecessary features to make it work better. This reduced any difficulties for users. I did the same thing for my open source portfolio website spikeysanju.com, where I made sure that users could consume the content without any distractions. That was the main goal for both projects.
Yeah, or wireframing, or low-fidelity prototyping. Definitely not new advice, but I guess it'll be somebody's first exposure to the idea, so they'll learn a new thing today.
Yea, I find this article kind of weird in the number of comments it has drawn. Low-fidelity wire framing for workflows has been a UX/UI standard for like a decade now.
I like to use low hardware machines and tweak the os and software to conform to it. One of my favorite changes is to disable websites from using their own fonts and colors and other things in Firefox. It basically disables all css that doesn't deal with layout mechanics.
I fight this battle all the time with my UX people vs my engineers. UX are informed over and over about the technical limitations of our platforms. Nonetheless I have to calm down the engineers when we do updates/redesigns and the UX try to do things they should know quite well by now that we can't do and wouldn't even make sense. Being a part time PM is rough. I'm looking into getting back into strictly coding now, as the extra money and promotion was not worth it. Hopefully I picked up some people management skills though -_-
I've used Craigslist for, what, decades and I never found it to be user-hostile. If I owned it, I would probably make a few tweaks here and there but I have no trouble at all placing an ad or browsing the listings. It's a very honest design and I think that speaks to people.
Contrast that to the thing that is replacing it: Facebook marketplace. It's beautiful, but, the barrier to entry is high, there is no practical way to browse specific categories, search shows tons of irrelevant results, there is no way to set up keyword or category alerts, and it's riddled with scams and flakes. The entire object of FB is not to get anything done, it's to keep you scrolling for as long as possible.
What's user-hostile about Craigslist's design? Do you think Windows 95 UX is user-hostile too? Many people would say that having a strict adherence to universal UI conventions such that "your buttons always look like buttons" (Windows 95) or "your links always look like links, and your form inputs always look like form inputs" (Craigslist) is more usable.
(Also, if you think Craigslist "has no incentive to change", you probably haven't used it in a while. It was rebuilt — 5+ years ago now! — as a modern HTML5 website that only vaguely resembles its previous HTML4 minimal-CSS no-JS approach. But even that old design was extremely usable.)
Hmm, first-mover advantage maybe, but there's no real "network effect" I can see - are all my friends on CL? How would I even know? Craigslist is heroically ugly, but I wouldn't call that "user hostile" - the only obvious dysfunction I can see are the usual gaming of listings a la eBay etc., from local car dealerships spamming keywords, etc.
Network effects in a marketplace are clear. Buyers go where the sellers are, sellers go where the buyers are, etc.
Craigslist networking is mostly local, so some places there's not much in the way of listings (for jobs, services, marketplace, etc) and some places only one category is popular and some places you would find your job, your apartment, your furniture, and before personals went away, maybe your spouse.
1. Craigslist is only used as an example. It could have been any other minimalist website. The post is not calling to imitate Craigslist because it is successful, it is calling to use minimal design (like Craigslist) for your MVP because if it has any real value-add, your users will love it anyway.
2. Like others have said, Craigslist's design is not user hostile.
In what way is Craigslist "user hostile"? Craigslist pages are information dense but hardly hostile. They don't waste 75% of the screen on whitespace. That's not hostile.
This also applies to downvoted posts on HN. On a windows machine i have to highlight them to read them, on mac it's a problem because the highlight color doesn't make a good contrast with the grey, and I don't want to change my system highlight color just for HN. I would much prefer a numerical score, or the downvoted comments being rendered into comic sans than having the comment fade away. Often good and valid comments are hidden through groupthink. Also, I still want to read comments I might disagree with even if they come from people I dislike.
I check up on the websites of current and former employers, and they've basically all turned into this same template where all the text is vague and lofty while telling you nothing about the company or service("CloudProduct from Tech Corp is the best way to transform your data operations for next generation workloads"), the graphics are all flat corporate Memphis or stock images (no screenshots or demo videos of the actual product), and the pages all do that annoying thing where effects/elements appear and disappear as you scroll down the page.
I don't know, maybe this is the sort of thing that works on product/marketing people but to me it just seems like pointless fluff and makes me not want to look any deeper into the company or product.